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The Turing Test, developed by English Mathematician Alan Turing, is designed to measure the ability of a computer program to mimic human conversation.

In the test, human integrators communicate via a terminal with either a human or a computer simulation. If a program can convince 30% of judges that it is human, then it passes the Turing Test. However, since it was devised in the 1950s no machine has ever passed.

The test forms the basis of the Loebner Prize, which awards cash prizes to the best conversational software, and was this year held at the University of Reading. A $3,000 award was given to the best performing

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program in the competition, Elbot.

Elbot convinced a quarter of the 12 judges that it was in fact a human, only marginally below the 30% pass rate set by Turing.

Surprisingly, Elbot is not the product of a large and well-funded research team, but was written by one man, Fred Roberts. The program can be tested from within a browser by visiting the Elbot homepage.

"Although the machines aren't yet good enough to fool all of the people all of the time, they are certainly at the stage of fooling some of the people some of the time," says the organiser of the Turing Test, Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading's School of Systems Engineering.

"Today's results actually show a more complex story than a straight pass or fail by one machine. Where the machines were identified correctly by the human interrogators as machines, the conversational abilities of each machine was scored at 80 and 90%.

"This demonstrates how close machines are getting to reaching the milestone of communicating with us in a way in which we are comfortable. That eventual day will herald a new phase in our relationship with machines, bringing closer the time in which robots start to play an active role in our daily lives"